Open AccessCONDITIONAL ASSOCIATION AND UNIDIMENSIONALITY IN MONOTONE LATENT VARIABLE MODELS
Author(s) -
Holland Paul W.,
Rosenbaum Paul R.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
ets research report series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.235
H-Index - 5
ISSN - 2330-8516
DOI - 10.1002/j.2330-8516.1985.tb00132.x
Subject(s) - local independence , latent class model , latent variable , observable , latent variable model , conditional independence , mathematics , econometrics , conditional probability distribution , variable (mathematics) , structural equation modeling , statistics , physics , mathematical analysis , quantum mechanics
Latent variable models represent the joint distribution of observable variables in terms of a simple structure involving unobserved or latent variables, usually assuming the conditional independence of the observable variables given the latent variables. These models play an important role in educational measurement and psychometrics, in sociology, in population genetics, and are implicit in some work on systems reliability. We study a broad class of latent variable models, namely the monotone unidimensional models, in which the latent variable is a scalar, the observable variables are conditionally independent given the latent variable, and the conditional distribution of the observables given the latent variable is stochastically increasing in the latent variable. All models in this class imply a new strong form of positive dependence among the observable variables, namely conditional (positive) association. This positive dependence condition may be used to test whether any model in this class can provide an adequate fit to observed data. Various applications, generalizations, and a numerical example are discussed.